Breaking new ground #1 : Zines

$100 and a T-shirt is the best documentary about zines I've seen.  It's actually a 45 minute doc, from the late 1990's or early 2000's, I think, from the Pacific Northwest.  But this is only a 5 minute promo for it.  I can't find the full documentary on YouTube anymore.  Zines are what turned me from a dreamer into a doer.  Publishing my first zine changed the course of my life, for the better, though it may not seem like that to a lot of people, looking at my life now.  

This blog you're reading, Steve Emig: The White Bear, is creeping up on the 1,000 blog post mark.  I've published well over 2,800 blog posts total, across more than 50 blog ideas I've tried, since 2008.  About a week ago I noticed I was getting close to 1,000 posts, and I started wondering how to best celebrate this milestone.  My original Freestyle BMX Tales blog, published from 2009-2012, got to just over 500 posts (here's FBMXT version 3).  This blog, which I honestly thought hardly anyone would read when I started it in 2017, is now nearly double that.  

After thinking about the 1,000 post milestone for a few days, I decided to write a series of posts about some of the things I've done that broke some new ground, in some way.  Looking back now, from age 57, some things in my life seem like they were meant to happen.  Over the years, I was drawn to several ideas and trends early on in their existence, the weird little sport of BMX freestyle being one of them, in 1983.  This sounds weird now, as a fat, middle-aged, broke, homeless guy.  But there were a bunch of times in my life where I got into something early on, or had an idea and acted on it, in some trend that got much bigger later as time passed.  I've written about some of these things in this blog, but in bits and pieces over several years.  

Writing and self-publishing is another one of those things.  I published my first Xerox zine, as we called them back then, in September of 1985.  Xerox (pronounced ZEER-ox, kids) was the best known brand of photocopy machines, which we used to copy pages for our zines.  Somewhere in one of the early issues of FREESTYLIN' magazine, editor Andy Jenkins talked about zines.  He said there were some skateboarders, and a few BMX freestylers, that self-published little, handmade booklets, about their local scenes.  I didn't dream of being a writer when I was a kid.  I liked taking photos, but I didn't even have a 35mm camera.  I took pretty good snapshots.  Something about the idea of making a zine appealed to me.  I thought about publishing a zine for several months.  I drew pictures, and designed what it the cover page would look like, while living in Boise, Idaho, in 1985.  But I didn't actually make a zine.  I just thought about making a zine.  That's what I did as a kid.  I had big ideas, and I daydreamed all the time.  I thought about doing cool stuff, and then I didn't actually do it.  

I graduated from high school in Boise, Idaho, in 1984, and didn't have any money to go to college.  So I decided to "take a year off."  I worked one job all summer, then worked at a big Mexican restaurant and lived at home, through 1984 and into 1985.  My dad got laid off in the spring of 1985, and soon found a new job, in San Jose, California.  He flew there and started working.  My mom and my sister moved there in June, right after her school was out.  I worked my summer job in Boise, managing a tiny amusement park called The Fun Spot, and rented a room at my best friend's house.  The Fun Spot closed for the season in the middle of August, right before school started up again.  Once that job was over, I packed up my ugly, brown, gigantic, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo down to San Jose.  Just over a year out of high school, and a month and a half after my 19th birthday, I moved in with my parents and sister in San Jose, a place that was just beginning to be called Silicon Valley.  

I didn't have any money for college, so "taking a year off" turned into a second year.  I got a job at a local Pizza Hut, working the evening shift.  I knew there were some pro riders, and a bunch of good amateur freestylers, in the Bay Area, but didn't know any of them, or where to find them.  The San Francisco Bay area is huge, and this was long before the internet.  So I decided to finally publish a BMX freestyle zine, as a way to meet other freestylers.  

I had never actually seen a real zine, I only read about them in FREESTYLIN' magazine.  I used some photos from a trip to Venice Beach for an AFA contest that summer, and spent a few days making my first zine.  I put a few copies each in several bike shops that carried BMX bikes.  The idea worked, I met some riders who lived in San Jose, John Vasquez and his friends.  They told me when and where the meet-ups happened with other riders from the region.  I started making it to the Beach Park ramp jams, and later to Golden Gate Park on the weekends, when possible.  I became the "zine guy" for that scene, from late 1985 into mid 1986.  

I published that first zine, San Jose Stylin', shooting photos with a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, and typing on a 1940's era, manual (as in NOT electric), Royal typewriter, that I bought for $15 at the swap meet.  The first couple of issues were just three pages, black and white copies, with stories and photos on both sides, and stapled in the upper left hand corner, like a test at school.  Then someone told me zines, generally, were folded in half, like little books.  Around issue #3, I started laying my zine out sideways on typing paper, and folding them into book-style zines.  I soon bought an extra long stapler to complete the zine publisher's kit.  I used that Royal typewriter, and one single silk ribbon, for all 11 issues of San Jose Stylin'.  

When I made it up to the Beach Park Ramp Jam, at the shop where Skyway pro, Robert Peterson worked, I met pros, Peterson, Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, and amateurs John Ficarra, Chris and Karl Rothe, Darcy Langlois, and a few other riders, on that first trip.  I handed out my zines.  All the guys said, "Cool... when's the next one come out?"  My reply was, "Next one?"  My whole idea with the zine was to use it as an excuse to meet the other riders of the Bay Area, so I'd have other freestylers to ride with on the weekends.  I didn't really think about doing more zines after that. 

This is one early lesson about both zines, and about meeting your heroes, or people you look up to in some way.  It's always cool to have a gift, even a really small one, when you meet people, particularly famous people, or people you want to get to know.  A gift of some kind sets you apart when you meet people.  A zine, even a sketchy one, was a cool gift to BMX freestylers in those days.  In September of 1985, there were maybe 4 or 5 freestylers publishing zines, across the country.  They usually only made copies for their group of friends, and maybe a few to trade with other zine publishers.  So most freestylers had never seen a zine, or maybe only a couple of them.  

Another good thing about zines (and blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels today), is that they give you a great excuse to interview people you want to meet.  Now, decades later, in adult life, I see this on YouTube channels all the time.  People start podcasts and YouTube channels as an excuse to meet people in sports, business, tech, or some subculture, that they personally want to meet.  Even famous people do this.  Race car driver Danika Patrick has a podcast, called Pretty Intense, where, as famous as she is already, interviews people in all kinds of other areas of life that she's interested in.  

Lots of other people do the same.  That's what I did with my zine in late 1985 and early 1986.  I interviewed Skyway and Curb Dogs pro freestylers like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzales, Rick Allison, and several more of the NorCal riders.  I wrote about the contests we went to.  I shot photos of those guys, first on my little Kodak Instamatic, and later with a 35mm Pentax.  In the process, I got to know those guys, beyond just being one of the amateurs riding with them on the weekends.   

My zine just kind of evolved naturally.  One really good idea I had early on was to send my zines to the real BMX magazines, in Southern California.  But I didn't just send one copy to each magazine. I sent one copy to each person on the editorial staff, and the photographers, too, I think.  My thought was, to have them getting my zine in the mail, and checking their own personal copy out in their office.  Then, on a coffee brake or lunch, they would tell the others, "I got this zine today from this kid named Steve up in San Jose, it's pretty cool."  I wanted them to not only have a copy of my zine, but to talk about my zine, with each other.  This turned out to have effects I never imagined.

In addition to handing out zines to the local NorCal freestylers, and mailing them to the staff at the four BMX magazines at the time, I made extra copies to take to freestyle contests, where I handed them out to other pros and the people I wanted to meet.  This is also how I met other zine publishers at first.  We traded zines at contests. Then we would mail copies of our zines to each other later on.  Zine publishers was a tiny subculture, within the larger subculture of BMX freestyle.  By issue 11 of San Jose Stylin', I had a snail mail list of over 120 people across the U.S. that I was sending zines to.  None of them paid me, they just wrote and asked for a zine.  I was spending half of the $450 a month I made at Pizza Hut on publishing and mailing my zines, and on long distance phone charges, which were a thing in the 1980's. 

 My life, for that year of late 1985 into mid 1986, was to wake up late, and often run errands with my mom, or do any chores around the house.  Then I'd go ride solo for 2-3 hours every day, in the early afternoon.  I'd go home, take a shower, and go work from about 5 pm until midnight, at Pizza Hut, five nights a week.  Most of that year I was the shift supervisor for the night shift.  All during my shift, I'd be chugging little cups of Pepsi or Mountain Dew (No Coke at Pizza Hut).  I got home, often riding my bike the mile and a half, after midnight, wired on caffeine.  I would do a few balance tricks in my bedroom on my bike, and then work on my zine, either typing, transcribing interviews (off audio cassettes), or laying the zine out with Scotch tape on pieces of typing paper.  When an issue was done, then I'd do the folding and stapling, and labeling the copies that got mailed.  To be honest, it's a good thing I got the job at FREESTYLIN', because I could not have afforded to keep publishing San Jose Stylin' much longer on my Pizza Hut wages.  It was eating up half of my meager pay.

Eleven monthly issues of San Jose Stylin' landed me a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, in the summer of 1986.  Remember my idea of sending a copy to each of the editorial guys at the magazines, that helped with the Wizard Publications guys.  With a bike, a suitcase, and $80, I got on a plane in San Jose, and flew off to a new life in SoCal.  I was so nervous about starting work there, that I got the hives really bad, and wore long sleeve shirts to work for about a week, until they went away.  That was about three weeks after my 20th birthday.  Without ever going to a single college class, at age 20, I was replacing a guy with an English degree, and suddenly responsible for proofreading two magazines each month, among more mundane duties.  Getting the job offer was totally because of my zine.  

Once I got to Wizard Publications, I was suddenly working with two experienced zine publishers, Andy Jenkins and Gork (editor of BMX Action at the time), and one zine connoisseur, Mark "Lew" Lewman.  It was only then that they showed me how to really have fun and do zine-style Xerox art, blowing up and shrinking and distorting letters and photos.  While my first zine had solid content, it flat out sucked in the design category.  I got to practice Xerox art while working at the AFA later on, as editor and photographer of their newsletter, and with the 30 or more zines I've published since 1986.  From 3 full size, 81/2" X 11" pages, (12 zine pages) for that first zine, I've published several zines that clocked in at 48 pages or more, which are basically little, handmade books.  You can put a hell of a lot of content in 48 or 52 zine pages.  My first poetry zine in 1992 was over 80 pages, and bound with duct tape.

More than anything, publishing that first zine, month after month, turned me from a big daydreamer into someone who could actually finish projects.  After a while, actually starting... and finishing projects, became a habit.  Sure, they were small projects, but I became a guy who did things, I didn't just think about them.  That made a huge difference in my life.  Maybe I wasn't doing really big things, but as a zine publisher, I began to actually do projects.  

I've been doing that ever since, at one level or another.  And little projects add up, over time.  Publishing one blog post isn't a big project.  But it's a project.  I've published well over 2,800 posts now, plus another 50+ longer posts/essays, on my Substack.  

However sketchy my living situation may be these days, I actually am one of the most prolific bloggers on the whole fucking planet.  For real.  Seth Godin is the most prolific blogger I know of, but it's hard to find any other single bloggers that have written thousands of blog posts actual original content, no one seems to keep stats on the most prolific bloggers.  But with 2,800+ posts written, I'm up there, probably in the top 1/10th of 1% of the 600 million blogs online.  And it all started with publishing a six page zine, 39 years ago, because I wanted to meet some BMX freestylers in San Jose.  Like the tortoise and hare fable, slow and steady work really adds up as the years go by.  

I only lasted a few months at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, I was a really moody, uptight, dork then, and not the right fit for that business.  They hired 17-year-old Spike Jonze after I left, he was the right fit for Wizard Publications.  Meanwhile, I was editor of the American Freestyle Association newsletter for most of 1987, so I didn't publish any zines then.  Then I got a job at Vision's video company, Unreel Productions.  After a few months, I got the urge to do a new zine.  So I started a zine called Periscope, and published a few issues over the next couple of years.  The idea behind Periscope was that everyone sees the world differently, like a submarine commander looking through a periscope.  So that zine was my little view of the world during that era.  I've published somewhere over 40 separate zines, including the 11 issues of San Jose Stylin'.  As I write this blog post, I have a master copy of my latest zine in my backpack right now, which I haven't made any copies of yet.  

My most popular zine ever was The White Bear's Very, Very Unofficial Guide to Huntington Beach.  I published that zine in 2007, I think, for passengers in my taxi.  Back then, every summer, maybe 300 college age Irish kids came to Huntington Beach for the summer.  They lived with 8-10 guys and girls renting one house or apartment, to keep rent cheap, and they all found local jobs.  I kept picking them up in my taxi, and they were always asking where different things were.  So I made a zine that had a whole bunch of the history of Huntington Beach, and also listed the best restaurants, dive bars, clubs nearby, weird places, and different stores and stuff.  I actually learned a lot about H.B. while making the zine myself.  I handed those zines out, over 250 of them, that summer.  People heard about the zines, and would come up to my taxi when I was sitting downtown.  "Are you the guy who wrote that book about H.B?  Can I get one?"  I probably spent $350 publishing those zines, and got $2,000 or $2,500 worth of taxi rides from it.  That's the one time a zine made me money.  

When I started publishing zines in 1985, the only zines I had ever heard of were BMX freestyle and skateboarding zines.  Then I heard that the "zine thing" started with punk rock fanzines in the late 1970's.  In the 1990's, zine culture exploded.  While I was making BMX freestyle zines, and 1980's skaters were making skateboard zines, and punkers were making punk zines, the whole idea of zines spread.  I remembered Thomas Paine's "anonymous pamphlet" called Common Sense, that was self-published and played a role in the American Revolution.  We all learn about this as kids in school, and it could definitely be compared to a zine in its day.  Ben Franklin published Poor Richard's Almanac, which I wouldn't call a zine, but he also published less popular things, and so did other people who had access to a printing press in the 1700's.  So DIY (Do It Yourself) writing and self-publishing has been around as long as the printing press, invented way back in 1440.

But the true roots of modern zines seem to have been rooted in 1920's and 1930's science fiction fanzines, what we might call fan fiction today on the internet.  In the 1960's, there were zines called "chapbooks" with beat poetry or maybe political or activist ideas.  Then came the punk rock fanzines of the 1970's, leading into the hardcore punk and DIY spirit as a key element of punk rock.  Those fanzines inspired all kinds of weirdos, like myself, who began to write and publish all kinds of zines, including BMX freestyle and skateboarding, in the 1980's.  A bit later came the feminist world of Riot Grrrl zines in the early 1990's, along with many other niche zines, from subcultures like activists, vegans, LGBTQ, and others.  

In those years right before the internet came along, the early and mid 1990's, there were so many zines being published, that a magazine listing and reviewing zines, called Factsheet 5, was available on newsstands.  The Factsheet 5 database ultimately had over 10,000 different zines listed and reviewed in it.  Zine culture got its own theme song in 1998 with the release of Harvey Danger's song "Flagpole Sitta," where the singer sings that he wants to publish zines, among other things.  

Then came the mass adoption of the internet, and first blogs, even before "Flagpole Sitta" hit the charts, and we all thought the zine days were over.  I mean, why spend the time and money to actually type up, print out, put together, and distribute zines, when you can potentially reach half of the population of the Earth, by publishing a website or a blog, for free?  

As much as I like blogs, because they are easy, free, and can incorporate video and audio, it turns out blogs and zines are very different animals.  You can't physically hand someone a blog.  There's a weird kind of fun and craftiness about actually making a zine by hand.  And people read zines.  Blogs are much more hit and miss.  With a blog, you have to not only publish it, but you have to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization), continually direct traffic to it, and keep active on social media to promote your blog, so readers will actually find it.  Plus, your latest blog post is fighting for attention against the other 12 million blog posts published today, among the 600 million or so blogs already out there online.  

You can make a zine, hand it to someone, and chances are they will read it, cover to cover, sooner or later.  Even people who don't read much, will read a zine.  Zines are much, much less intimidating to read than a book.  All of that means that there is still a place for zines, and they still work well in all kinds of subcultures, for niche groups of people.  Zines are still popular in groups ranging from BMXers to graphic designers to comic artists, to today's version of the 90's Riot Grrrrls, independent writers and thinkers, poets, artists, and 20 other flavors of activists.  Just today, working on this blog post, I learned that Amy Poehler directed the movie Moxie in 2019, where a high school girl sees her mom's zines (90's Riot Grrrl stuff), and starts her own zine.  I haven't seen the movie, but the trailer makes it look like a zine-inspired feminist revolution takes place at her high school.   

Anyhow, now thirty years into the internet age, as Web 2 is fighting Web 3, and people even I think are old still run way too many businesses and much of national politics, zines still have a place in the world.  There will always be independent thinkers and writers, and all kinds of subcultures and niche groups.  Zines are a good way to cover those scenes.  And I, for one, love that.  

Publishing a zine changed my life, mostly just by teaching me that I can have a good idea, and put it out in a way some people can check it out, tosee if the idea catches on.  Some ideas do, and some don't.  Zines were a really fringe thing when I made my first one, 39 years ago.  Zines are always fringe, and always a way for DIY thinking to get out to a small audience.  Actually publishing zines is a great way to begin to share ideas on all kinds of niche subjects, and zines play a role that blogs, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels just can't play.  While blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos are quickly forgotten, zines are treasured items.  They get tossed into boxes, the backs of sock drawers, and other places, where they often get rediscovered months or years later.  

One of my favorite magazines of the 1990's, the Asian pop culture publication Giant Robot, began as a Xerox zine.  I bought a re-pop version of Issue #1, with a sleeping Sumo wrestler on the cover, at a zine convention in the 1990's.  That first issue was an epic zine, and the beginning of a whole Asian culture movement and popularity trend.  Giant Robot lives on now as a shop and art gallery.

To bring this full circle, I was one of the early zine publishers in the new sport of BMX freestyle, in the mid 1980's.  San Jose Stylin' was listed as the top BMX freestyle zine in the U.S. in the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, which also contained my first freelance article.  Just for the record, Mat Hoffman's very first editorial photo was in that article.  For real. Cool coincidence. 

BMX freestyle was only a couple of years old as a competitive sport when I published my first zine.  I was one of the early pioneers of BMX freestyle zines, and still love both BMX freestyle and zines, decades later.  Zine publishing is one of the things BMX freestyle led me to, that I got into early, and learned a lot from.  I lost my zine collection in 2008 (with everything else from my BMX life), but I'll keep putting out zines now and then well into the future.  I got to watch zine culture grow and spread, and keep going even with the internet and billions of web pages.  That's pretty cool.  

Here are some other videos and an essay about zines...

The History of Zines with Kate Bingaman-Burt  (Look at the still shot of this video) 

Zines and the Punk Side of Publishing

A Brief History of Zines

Riot Grrrl: The 90's Movement that Redefined Punk

The Wonderful World of Zines - a written post on my Substack with more of my thoughts on zines

Shout out to Brian Reed, though I forget the name of his zine, he's the one zine publisher from that era, that I traded zines with, and am still in contact with today.  

I've been doing a lot of more in depth writing on a platform called Substack.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Check out my writing on Substack

Here's a clip of Joe Rogan interviewing Substack founder Chris Best, on the JRE podcast.  Substack is a platform designed for writers and readers.  Writers can write and publish on Substack, and readers can find the work on the website, or subscribe either for free content, or behind a paywall.  When readers subscribe, the posts, or newsletters, are sent to their email.  The platform is set up for writers to publish the original work they're really passionate about, and be able to make a living at it, if they can draw a big enough paid audience.  For lesser known writers, it's a place to publish and build an email list, and have the potential to start charging for their work at some point.  

You can check out my Substack page, and subscribe if you like, at this link:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

I started my first zine with a manual (as in NOT electric) typewriter, almost identical to this one above, except mine was the "travel model" built into a little suitcase.  It was the laptop of its day, made for traveling journalists and writers.  It was a 1930's or 1940's era Royal.  I bought the typewriter for $15 at the San Jose Swap Meet.  I published 11 issues of my first zine with that typewriter, which landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, drawing me into the BMX industry.   Public domain photo.

I'm 57 years old now, and I've been self-publishing my writing for 38 years, since I started my first BMX freestyle zine, in September of 1985.  I wasn't trying to be a writer then, I was 19, and had just moved to San Jose, California, from Boise, Idaho, with my family.  I didn't have .  Armed with an ancient Royal typewriter, and a Kodak 110 instamatic camera, I published my first zine.  When I met Bay Area riders, they said, "This is cool, when the next one coming out?" I said, "Next one?  So I went to work on making another zine, and wound up being the zine guy for the Bay Area freestyle scene in late 1985 and half of 1986, putting out 11 issues of San Jose Stylin'.  

I spent a few months working at Wizard Publications, doing some writing, all the proofreading, but working mostly as an assistant for the other editors and our photographer.  I wasn't the right fit at Wizard, and they laid me off.  I got a job as editor and photographer for the AFA (American Freestyle Association) newsletter, for most of 1987.  More writing, and shooting mediocre photos with my 35 mm Pentax.  That job led to producing some videos for the AFA, which led me to a job a Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company, in December of 1987.  

While I learned how videos were made at Unreel, working as everybody's production assistant there, I had some time and money, and I was starting to think of myself as a writer.  I was writing poetry, but not telling anyone about it, thanks to a former girlfriend who was a singer in a local rock band.  Trying to write her a hit song led to writing "lyrics."  After she dumped me, I realized that when you don't have a band, "song lyrics" are actually poems.  I had become a closet poet, and public zine publisher through the late 1980's and early 1990's.  Somewhere in that period, I started journaling, and trying to be a "real" writer.  Like every wannabe writer in their 20's, I planned to become a famous writer by writing a bestselling book, or maybe a hit movie screenplay, at some point.  That didn't happen.  But I kept writing.

What did happen is that I began to write, mostly in my journal, on a regular basis.  Through the 1990's, I put out a handful of zines, mostly about BMX, but with other bits that interested me.  In 1992, inspired by a Henry Rollins poetry book my roommate showed me, I published my first zine of poetry.  Coming out of the poet closet, and putting my mushiest thoughts and feelings out in public scared the shit out of me.  I gave a copy to one of the American Gladiators, who I worked with.  A crew guy on the show named Lico, a Mexican American hippy and diehard Grateful Dead fan, said my stuff reminded him or Jack Kerouac.  Much to my surprise, several people actually liked my poetry.  That first poetry zine, published in 1992, also earned me the nickname The White Bear, which, I took as my poetry penname for a while.  

All together, In the 1980's and 1990's, I published over 35 zines, was a staff writer for four BMX magazines, and contributed words or photos to four more.  In the early and mid 2000's, I was working mostly as a taxi driver, and most of my writing was journaling, though I put out a few zines.  My most popular zine ever, The White Bear's Very, Very Unofficial Guide to Huntington Beach, is one I published in 2006 (I think).  I handed out over 250 copies of that 48 page zine in my taxi, to passengers, and H.B. locals.  That's the only zine that ever made me money.  I probably made about $1,500 in taxi rides from people who called me, form my name and number on the zine.  There are about 300 Irish kids, all college age, who came to Huntington Beach every summer, and they kept asking where different things were.  So I made the zine as a guide book, and looked up a whole bunch of H.B. history, like the old 1920's brick jail cells behind the Longboard bar downtown, across the alley.  Locals started seeing the zine, and that whole summer people would walk up to my taxi when I was parked down town, and ask, "Can I get one of those little H.B books?"  

In 2007, I discovered blogs.  I used to pay $5 an hour to get on the internet at the Huntington Beach library, because I didn't have my own computer.  I started a blog about taxi driving.  It completely sucked.  My health was getting really bad because of all the weight I gained driving a cab.  I got cellulitis, a severe leg infection, three times, and the first bout nearly killed me.  At the same time, the taxi business was dying, and so was I, so I had to quit.  That sucked, because my taxi was my source of income, my transportation, and I lived in it.  

I wound up living on the streets of Orange County, CA, for a year, unable to find work, and panhandling to survive.  Eventually I accepted my family's offer of a plane ticket to North Carolina.  I'd never lived there, and I didn't want to, I grew up in Ohio and Idaho mostly, I had no connection to NC.  My parents and my sister's family just wound up there years after I moved out.  

As the U.S. plunged into the Great Recession, in November of 2008, I wound up living in my parent's spare bedroom, in a tiny apartment, in a small town, in central North Carolina.  I couldn't find any job, I was broke, living with my mellow dad and my mom, who I never got along with.  I was fat, broke, didn't have a BMX bike, living in a toxic household again, and completely depressed.  But my parents' computer was in my room.  It was the first time I ever had full time access to the internet.  So after a couple weeks of surfing the web and watching too much porn, I decided to start a blog, about my time in the BMX industry.  I started a blog called FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales.  I knew nothing about the internet, or online communities.  I didn't know how to do tags, or even upload a photo.  I was basically a tech Luddite, but needed some creative outlet to keep from going completely insane in NC.  I wrote little stories about working at FREESTYLIN' magazine.  I thought the internet was like this big black hole, a void with weird little web pages just kind of floating around out in the void.  So I wrote little stories about working at the magazines, and set them adrift, out there in the interwebs.  

After about 30 posts, one post went viral in the Old School BMX Freestyle community online.  I didn't even know there was an Old School BMX community online.  Friends, and riders I didn't even know, started emailing, and telling me to keep writing my weird BMX stories.  So I did.  Since early December of 2008, I've written over 2,500 blog posts, and tried at least 50 different blog ideas out.  I've pulled in somewhere over 450,000 page views in the 14 years since.  To top it off, I just contributed to one of the articles in Greystoke magazine, the first Old School BMX magazine, which just came out.  I was stoked to be asked to do that.  

I not only couldn't find a good job in North Carolina, I couldn't find any job.  I couldn't get hired as a gas station cashier or anything.  Because of that, from sometime in 2009 on, I've been trying to figure out how to make a living as a writer in the 21st  century.  It's a completely different world from the 1980's, when magazines dominated.  Now it's about self-publishing, and "building your own brand," and then finding some way to "monetize your audience."  I found an audience in the Old School BMX freestyle world, but haven't figured out the monetize part.    

I've come full circle as a writer.  I've spent 38 years writing about things I'm interested in, and putting much of that work out in the world, in some way, a DIY self publisher since way back.  In those 38 years, I've been an actual paid writer for less than two years.  

Just over a month ago, I found Substack, a platform designed for people who love to write, and think they have something to say to the world.  I tried it out, and spent the last month figuring out how my writing and ideas would fit into the parameters of this new platform.  I've got about 20 posts on Substack, most of them pretty long, and on a single subject.  Only one is about BMX.  This is where I'm going to do most of my writing from now on.  

There will be some BMX stuff, but there will be a whole lot of other ideas, as well.  I will still be writing stuff on this blog, just less stuff, and mostly BMX or action sports related.  If you want to check out my Substack page, the link is below.  You can subscribe, which just means you'll be added to my email list, and each post will go into your email box.  You can check them out, or delete them, like all the other crap emails we all get.  Thanks for checking out this blog, and reading some of my stuff.  Hit me up on Facebook with any thoughts, comments, or ideas.  To all of the freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos who read my blogs, thanks, and keep on rockin' it.  Here's the link to Substack again.  There's lots more to come...

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Left out of my zines: Pete Augustin

If you were a BMX freestyler in the 80's, and someone mentioned the name Pete Augustin, riding like what's in this clip is probably what comes to mind.  In the Webster's Dictionary of Freestyle in the 1980's, if you looked up "aggro," there was a picture of Pete riding street.  Remember that pic of him doing a lookback off a curb with the back tire tagging a the top of  trash can?  Yeah.  Hard.  Tough.  Brash.  San Diego street riding.  That was Pete Augustin.

So it may surprise some people that, for some reason I can't really remember, Pete Augustin came up to The Spot in Redondo Beach once in a while and had some flatland sessions with us in 1986.  Pete was Chris Day's favorite rider, and the guy Chris wanted to emulate back then, and I think Pete hooked Chris up with Bad Boy Club clothes, so maybe that's why he came up to The Spot.  In any case, Pete was one of the first SoCal pros I rode with.  I think R.L. was out on a tour when I first started at Wizard, and Pete was at The Spot a few times before R.L. got back.  He wasn't a huge flatland rider, but you pretty much had to ride flatland then, street wasn't its own genre yet, and Pete had some cool stuff.  The rolling backwards handstands were crazy.  Here's Pete on flat.



Sliders and backwards wheelies were big in late 1986, and two of my favorite tricks.  Pete (and Lew) ripped both at those.  I could do a halfway decent backwards wheelie (on the peg), but Pete was doing one handed ones.  I thought, "Damn, I need to step my shit up," and started learning those.  Lew already did solid one handed backwards wheelies.  But Pete also did one handed backwards wheelies, then would grab the front tire, and then let go and just hold the tire for a few seconds.  It took me months to get that variation dialed, it was just a weird balance point to keep. That's the big thing I remember from riding with Pete Augustin at The Spot in late 1986.

Even then, Pete had the reputation of being a guy people were afraid to talk to.  Everyone who didn't know him seemed to think that if you looked at him wrong, he'd punch you in the face.  Maybe he went off on some annoying kid at some point, and it got blown up, out of proportion.  But when I was riding with him at The Spot in those days, he was totally cool.  OK, he's not like Mr. Congeniality, the smooth-talking salesman type.  He would ride, we would ride, and we'd all be doing our own thing for a while.  Focused more than anything.  But when we started talking, he was cool.

So for the next three or four years, when riders from different parts of the country brought up this idea that Pete Augustin was totally unapproachable, I'd tell them he had always been cool to me, and while he was aggro as hell in his riding, he was cool to talk to.

A couple years later, at one of the local AFA comps in Anaheim, which were held at the R.G. Canning car shows, we had this brick patio area at the Anaheim convention center to practice in.  Wall rides were the new thing then, and a few of us were trying them on the brick wall of the patio.  Really, we were doing wall slides.  We'd bunnyhop next to the wall, and get both tires to touch the wall, sort of sliding against it.  Nobody was getting any real traction on the wall.  It was just flat horizontal ground to flat vertical wall, no bank to help us out.  We were all running 90 or more psi for flatland, which didn't help.

As we were doing that, Pete Augustin rolled out onto the patio.  We all did a couple of more lame wall slides.  Then Pete went to do one.  He did this gargantuan bunnyhop, hitting the wall nearly vertical, slamming the bottoms of his tires into the wall.  From flat ground, he bunnhopped into the wall, actually rode up it a bit, and pretty much did a kickturn on the wall, pulled out, and landed.  It was fucking amazing.  I'd never seen anyone stick to a wall like that coming off of flat ground.  Neither had the rest of the guys there.  Pete kind of smiled and rode away.  I don't think he even said anything.  The riding said it all.  "Like this, guys.  San Diego motherfuckers!"

 When writing the stories for my two 48 page zines about The Spot in Redondo, I wrote a few pages about the guys who weren't really locals when I was there, but rode with us now and then.  As I cut the sections down to actually fit in the zines, that part got cut.  The part about Pete Augustin isn't in the zines, so I decided to write a blog post about riding with him.

Four years later, shooting video for my first, completely self-produced video, Jess Dyrenforth invited me to a session at Mouse's ramp near San Diego, and Pete and Chris Day were there tearing it up, along with underground SoCal legend Mike Tokemoto.  You can see that section here at 38:05.  Pete's in the white T-shirt.  This section is the first serious spine ramp session EVER in a BMX freestyle video, so they were breaking new ground then.  So that's what I remember of Pete Augustin from the 1980's.

My zine about the The Spot in Redondo turned into two, solid, 48 page zines of stories and thoughts and photos.  The two big, fat zines, come with some original, homemade stickers and mini flyers.  We all know that zines immediately turn into collector's items, by their very nature.  They're so collectible, nobody ever sells their zines.  So I'm charging $15 for these 2-zine packs.  Each one is signed and numbered, you know, so you can sell it on Ebay if I ever hit the big time as a writer, like J.K. Rowling or something.  Or even Ed Templeton, his "Teens Smoking" books have sold for $500 on Ebay, believe that or not.

Anyhow, if you'd like to add these to your own collection, paypal me $15 to stevenemig13@gmail.com .   ("steven" not "steve")  Shipping is included in the continental U.S..   If you're in Canada, Alaska, or Hawaii, it's $20.  In Australia, New Zealand or the U.K., $25 U.S. You've read the blog, now get my stories into your hot little hands.  Or big hands.  The first packs are shipping out today.

I've got a new blog going, it's about building an art or creative business, or any small business.  You can check it out here:
WPOS Kreative Ideas

Excerpt from "The Spot": my two 48 page zines just out

BMX Action Trick Team founder, one of the first freestylers ever, and Redline, General, and Bully pro, R.L. Osborn.  AFA Masters, Columbus, Ohio, 1986.

In the middle of August of 1985, Idaho freestyler Jay Bickel and I were the Critical Condition Stunt Team, the only BMX freestyle team in the state of Idaho.  I was the 1985, 17 & Over flatland champion of Idaho (there were two of us in the comp).  We lived for the day that FREESTYLIN' magazine would show up in the mail, and we'd each read the whole thing, even the ads, that night.  Sometimes we'd read the whole thing twice, then Jay and I would meet up the next day and talk about all the new stuff in the mag.  That was life for a BMX freestyler outside of California in 1985. No matter what state or country you lived in, besides California, it was the same thing, waiting all month for that issue of FREESTYLIN' to show up, because that was the only info we got about freestyle,

Eleven and a half months later, I walked into an office against the back wall of Wizard Publications, located at 3162 Kashiwa Street, in Torrance, California (I still remember that address).  It was my office.  Lew's was next door, Gork's was 30 feet away, and R.L.'s office was maybe 40 feet away.  In less than a year I went from a goofball biker in B.F. Idaho, to an editorial assistant, and the official proofreader of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  It still blows me away that that happened.  The next night, I followed my new roommate/co-worker, Mark "Lew" Lewman down to The Spot, the local flatland session area by the Redondo Beach Pier.

I've just finished a Club Homeboy-style goodie pack, the start of the Freestyle BMX Tales zine series, featuring two handmade zines, each 48 pages.  That's 96 freakin' zine pages of stories about riding at The Spot in Redondo, and thoughts on how what was then the tiny little sport of BMX freestyle has spread worldwide since.  You can order the two-zine pack, which comes with some cheap ass, homemade, custom stickers, at the bottom of this post.  Here's one of the stories featured in zine #2:

Teaching R.L. Osborn a Trick

I've met a lot of people who say that "famous people are just people, to me they're the same as everyone else."  There's a lot of truth to that.  But not completely.  Famous people became famous for a reason.  Sure, it might not be a good reason.  The Kardashians are mostly "famous for being famous."  But to get there, they learned how to play the internet/social media game better than most.  I have no interest in them.  But a large number of people in pre-internet days were famous because they actually did something.  Actors acted classic roles in major movies that millions of people saw.  Musicians sang or played on albums millions listened to, and on and on.  Professional athletes developed skill and talent to compete at a very high level.

A lot of people who are famous worked really hard to get good at something, and then became famous for that skill at some point.  They moved beyond the realm of "normal" people.  In my younger years, I wanted to know what made those people different from everyone else.  Later on, I wanted to meet and hang out with famous people to learn what they did that I wasn't doing.

When I got into freestyle, and learned there was a hardcore entrepreneurial side to it, R.L. Osborn became the guy I most looked up to as a model of what I wanted to try and become.  I wanted to be a clean cut, professional BMX freestyler, a guy who could get business people and city leaders to take our weird little sport seriously.  Then, suddenly, I went form making 57 pizzas in four hours at Pizza Hut to having an office 40 feet away from R.L.'s office, and riding with him at The Spot a couple of nights a week.  It took me quite a while to just see him as R.L., the guy, and not R.L. the famous pro freestyler entrepreneur.

One night while riding, most everyone had taken off back home.  I think Chris Day was whipping boomerangs at one end of The Spot, and R.L. and I were practicing, each doing our own thing, near the other end.  At the time, I had a weird little tailwhip variation I was working on.  I was starting to do tailwhips differently.  The original, Brian Blyther tailwhip started with crossing a leg over the top tube to the other side of the bike, and jamming that foot behind the front wheel, then kicking the frame around with the other foot.

I think I was trying to learn Pinky squeaks, a Switzerland squeaker and tailwhips together, created by Gary "Pinky" Pollak.  So I would do a brake endo, jump up to my feet on the top tube, and push the frame around counter-clockwise with my right foot, and drop my left foot down to the back of the tire.  I'd figured out this cool little variation.  I crossed my right foot behind my left leg as the frame was coming around, I'd hit my back brake, and catch the right pedal with my right foot, then lift my left foot, cross it over the frame, and set it on the left pedal.  So I did a flatland tailwhip, but ended smoothly back in an endo posistion with my feet on the pedals.  This would be the ideal way to do a nosepick tailwhip, but those weren't invented yet.

So I was practicing those, what I called a "back can tailwhip."  The term "Nac-Nac," a can-can behind the other leg off a jump, hadn't been invented yet, either.  From behind me I heard, "Hey, what was that?"  It was R.L..  I didn't realize what I had done.  It was just a new thing I'd been doing about a week, and it never occurred to me that it was a cool trick.  But R.L. liked the look of it.  He rolled over to where I was.   

Suddenly, I found myself teaching a trick to R.L.Osborn, whose how-to's I'd read in magazines, and the guy I most wanted to emulate in freestyle.  My self-esteem was low enough back then that I never really felt like I was "really" part of the Golden Gate Park scene the year I rode with those guys.  I wasn't good enough, but dreamed of getting there someday.  All of the sudden, I'm teaching one of my variations to one of the top pros, and a pioneer of freestyle.  It was totally surreal for me.

I went through the trick a couple of times, showed R.L. the moves, and then coached him as he tried it two or three times, figured out the weird leg movement, and landed it.  This is what was so cool about freestyle back then, and still is to this day, through maybe not quite as much.  You couldn't be a kid today at the local basketball court and have Lebron or Curry come down and say, "Hey, what was the move you just did?"  It's just not going to happen, or maybe it could happen to one high school superstar in a million.  But never to a mediocre kid who's a bit creative.  But in BMX freestyle, and other always-progressing action sports, this kind of thing happens all the time.


So that's one little piece of the 96 pages worth of zines that I've just come out with.  Many of you remember my Freestyle BMX Tales blog, now I'm starting a series of zines by that name.  I want actual, physical, tangible copies of some of my best old school freestyle stories out there in the world.  And I'm homeless right now, so I don't have the resources to put out an actual book right now.  I'm a zine guy, going back 33 years now, so that's what I'm doing.  You all know that zines, by their very nature, are collector's items.  People keep zines.  OK, I lost all of mine in a move, which really sucked.  But most people keep zines.

So I'm charging a fair amount of money for this, and trying to make it worthwhile for all of you, and for me.  These are huge zines, as zines go, and each will be signed and numbered in the order people order them, because I plan to become as famous as J.K. Rowling someday, just so you can sell these zines on Ebay for $1,000 each.  OK, not really.  But they will be signed and numbered anyway.

 If you would like these first two zines full of stories about The Spot in Redondo Beach, you can Paypal me $15 to:  stevenemig13@gmail.com .   ("steven" not steve, there's a "v" in there).  Add your mailing address in the info.  Or email or Facebook it to me.

That includes shipping in the continental U.S..  If you're outside the "48" but in North America, make it $20.  If you're in the U.K., Australia, or New Zealand, make it $25 U.S..  OK?  Order one today.  Or ten.  If you're really brave, you can paypal me $35 and get The Spot zine pack, AND a one year membership to Club White Bear.  I'm not sure what that includes yet, except you'll get 6 CWB zines each year, and discounts on my art.  And more.  But you'd have to be kinda crazy to send that much money to a homeless dude.  But it you're the adventurous type, go for it...

These zines are pretty cool, and sleeping in an open doorway of an abandoned building in the winter is getting old.  When I get a room, I'll have more time to write and draw more cool shit.

I'm going to be sharing most of my old school BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...



 

Zine Guy... 33 years of losing money self publishing... and I still don't mind

This is the Golden Gate Park BMX freestyle scene in San Francisco, summer of 1986.  BMX freestyle, as we called it then, had only been an actual sport for two years.  We were inventing something new, and not realizing how far reaching our weird little sport would be.  I started my first zine in September of 1985 just to meet these guys.  It still amazes me how much that first zine changed the course of my life.  I'm the guy chasing his bike at 5:07.  Dumb trick I used to do in parades in Idaho, but hey, it got me on TV.

Edit- 4:15 pm, 10/13/2018- I just finished making my way through Richmond Zine Fest 2018, here at the Main Library.  Thanks to all zine publishers I talked to for your hospitality.

 I know I'm a sketchy looking old white guy with really bad teeth, but everyone here at Zine Fest was super friendly.  That's one of the great things about zines, bringing such a wide array of people together with a common interest.  In 1985, when I started doing zines, there were no zine fests, just some trading at BMX freestyle contests and through the snail mail.  As a really old dude who's been into zines for decades, it's really cool to see younger people not only publishing zines, but progressing, doing amazing art, design, and writing, and keeping this weird little world alive.  Props to all of you at Zine Fest today, it really stoked me out to see so many zinesters in one place.  I will be adding a ton of links to this post later today, so it might be worth coming back to tomorrow for another look.  

By the way, this is the only song I've ever heard mention zines.  Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" from 1997.  To me, it's the zine anthem.  Have you all heard it?

I was a dorky kid from the Midwest, born in Ohio in the mid 1960's, moved town to town as a kid in the 1970's, then to New Mexico for a year, then to Boise, Idaho in 1981, where I went to high school.  My parents moved us to a trailer park outside Boise for a year, so they could save money to buy a house.  During that year in the trailer park, in the desert, I got into BMX.  Then came BMX racing at Fort Boise in late 1982 and through 1983.  Then I got into the new sport of BMX freestyle, or trick riding, in 1984.

In 1985, a year after I graduated, my family moved to San Jose, California, where my dad just got a new job.  That was a year after this little guy came out from some tiny company called Apple Computers in nearby Cuppertino.  I worked my summer job in Boise, managing a tiny amusement park called The Fun Spot, and then I packed up my shit brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose.  I quickly found a job at a local Pizza Hut, just down the road from the Winschester Mystery House.  I worked evenings, and spent my afternoons riding my BMX freestyle bike by myself.

I started my first zine, San Jose Stylin', as a way to meet the riders of the Bay Area, some of the best anywhere in our little sport at the time.  It worked.  I was soon riding at the Beach Park Ramp Jams, put on by Skyway pro and mad scientist, Robert Peterson.  Within a few more weeks, I was traveling up to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco every weekend I could, to ride with the guys in the video above, and pros Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson, Rick Allison, and Hugo Gonzales, as well.  I interviewed Maurice  Meyer (featured in the video at the top of this post) and the others, I covered our scene, and shot photos of us sessioning.  I also called riders around the country, and was soon putting out much of the national BMX freestyle news two months before it came out in the magazines.

The smartest thing I did with my zine was to send individual copies to each of the editorial guys at BMX Action, BMX Plus, and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  Much to my surprise, after six months of putting zines out, I got a call from Andy Jenkins, the editor at FREESTYLIN'.  He wanted me to write a contest article, to cover the next big freestyle contest for the magazine.  That was March of 1986.  In the August issue of FREESTYLIN' (here- scan page 11/mag page 20), which hit news stands in late June, my article came out, as well as a new freestyle zine review article, where my zine was listed #1 in the country.  By August of 1986, I was offered a job at Wizard Publications, which put out BMX Action and FREESTYLIN'.  That job, which came directly because of my zine, changed the entire course of my life.

I only lasted five months working at the magazines, I just didn't click with those guys, and was permanently replaced by a 17-year-old biker/skater kid from Back East... this guy.  Really.  I got a job where I edited and shot photos for the American Freestyle Association newsletter for a year, then got a job at Vision Skateboards' video company, Unreel Productions.  I was the peon of the staff that put out videos like this and this and this.  By 1989, I was not only a freestyler riding every night for fun, I was staff cameraman at Unreel:

I published a few issues of a zine called Periscope while working at Unreel, covering freestyle, a little skating, and random other stuff.  The Vision Skateboards empire began to crumble in 1989, after growing just way too fast.  Unreel was shut down, and I was moved to Vision's main building.  I sat there in an office, alone, for six months, with nothing to do.  A lot of people might love that, but it drove me nuts.  Then I quit and produced my own BMX freestyle video, taking the DIY attitude of zines to the rapidly changing video world.  The Ultimate Weekend was the result.  I lost a bunch of money, but went on to work on TV shows in the early 1990's, like American Gladiators and a few others.

During the same time, pro BMX racer, jumping crazyman, and teenage entrepreneur, Chris "Mad Dog" Moeller, asked me to make the first video for his company, S&M Bikes.  The video cost $250 total, including beer money.  I lost my job while making it (long story), and wound up sleeping on the floor of the tiny, one bedroom apartment where Chris ran S&M out of the garage.

One morning, Chris came out and showed me a copy of a Henry Rollins book, Black Coffee Blues, full of poetry.  I'd been writing poems, and not telling anybody about them, since I had a girlfriend who was a singer five years earlier.  I thought I would write her a hit.  Then she dumped me.  Anyhow, I sat down at my typewriter, and put out a zine of my own poetry, called We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing.  The zine had about 100 poems, and was so thick, I had to bind it with duct tape.  The first poem was called "Journey of the White Bear," an autobiographical poem about my life, in metaphor.  That was the poem I wrote when my singer girlfriend dumped me.  Chris started making fun of me, calling me The White Bear.  That was 1992.  The nickname stuck, and that's still my name in the BMX world (and it's on my blog title).

I put out two more zines of poetry in 1996 and 1997, while working as a furniture mover.  In 1998, I did two or three issues of an action sports zine, called Session Sports, where I interviewed my neighbors, free skier Jason Moore, and skysurfer Troy Hartman.  I wrote a great interview with Sasquatch.  I also interviewed musician Bryan Gregory, founding member of The Cramps, who I worked with at a porn store.  That may have been the last in depth interview anyone ever did with him.  He died a couple of years later.

All in all, I've published about 40 zines, starting with the 11 issues of San Jose Stylin' in 1985-86.  I did a zine about taxi driving in 2005 or 2006.  I did a zine about Huntington Beach, where I worked as a taxi driver around the same time.  That was my most popular zine ever, called The White Bear's Very, VERY Unofficial Guide to Huntington Beach.  I put out about 150 or 200 copies of that one.  Initially, I gave them to the Irish kids, college age people who came to HB every summer from Ireland to work and party.  Eventually, people all over town heard about the zine, and would just walk up to my taxi and ask if they could get one.  That was the only zine that totally paid for itself.  I didn't charge for it, but I got a ton of taxi rides because of it, which more than paid for all the zines I made.  There's a lesson there. Both of those zines were 48 pages, by the way.

I did a zine for my dad's 70th birthday, in 2007, writing down a bunch of his old jokes, and putting pictures of classic cars (he owned three classic T-Birds as a young man).  It sounds lame, but he loved it. 

I've done some one-off zine-books, writing on a single subject.  One on a social theory of mine, I called The Warrior Sports, is my favorite, and I handed out about 50 copies at the 1998 X-Games in San Diego.  I even did a zine of short stories, that an old skateboard friend just sent me a copy of, also from 1998.

Zines, quite literally, changed the course of my life, towards a much more creative, if often crazy and sometimes broke, path.  Instead of being a BMX freestyler for 2 or 3 years, and then going back to college, the job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines changed the entire trajectory of my life.  And that was entirely due to my first zine.  All told, I wound up writing and/or getting photos published in 7 BMX magazines and a newsletter.  I produced and/or edited 15 BMX, skateboard, and snowboard videos, and worked on another ten or so at Unreel Productions.  That led to working on TV crews.  I've worked on over 300 episodes of a dozen different TV shows.  I also worked in the box office of the first five Cirque du Soleil tours that came to Orange County, California.  The first, Saltimbanco, in 1993, was when Cirque consisted of one touring show.  Now they have about 20 worldwide.  Besides that first, I worked on Allegria, Quidam, Dralion, and Varekai.  Cirque du Soleil is th ebest run company I ever worked for, the most creative, and nobody works as hard as circus people.  It's become huge and a lot more corporate over the years, and isn't near as much fun to work at the entry level.  But if I was forced to pick one company to work for the rest of my life, it would be Cirque du Soleil.  But that time has passed.  Now is the time to create my own "Cirque."

My latest zine is called Club White Bear, and is only available to members who pay $25 a year for a membership.  The idea is loosely based on Club Homeboy, a thing my FREESTYLIN' magazine co-worker and roommate, Mark "Lew" Lewman started in 1986.  It's geared toward old school BMXers, but is not limited to them.  Club White Bear only has two members at the moment, so it doesn't matter much.  I will do other zines on single subjects available to everyone as time roll on.

Other than the two zines my old friend just sent me, and the master of Club White Bear #1, I have no copies of any of my zines.  I lost my whole collection of zines, and everything else I owned, including vintage BMX and skateboard video footage, my magazine collection, master tapes of videos I produced, and copies of about 250 of the 500+ poems Ive written, in 2008, when I moved to North Carolina in 2008.  That was probably the darkest time of my adult life.  I simply stopped writing poetry.  North Carolina turned out to be ten years of living hell.  I finally was able to escape it in August.  I've been living homeless in Richmond ever since.  I landed here totally randomly, but there's a LOT of cool stuff happening here.  I've decided to stay for a while.  Priority one is getting my life stabilized, start making a steady income, and get my act together.  Then... then it's time to make some cool shit.  Stay tuned.

Here's a few things I've learned that zines are good for:
Losing money
Getting minority ideas out to a small number of people
Meeting other zine publishers
Getting your name known in a sport, genre', scene, or subculture of some sort
Making friends with similar outlooks on things

Here's what zines are bad for:
Making money

Yes, I'm homeless, I look like hell, and I'm broke at the moment.  What I lack in cash, I more than make up for in stories and insights into the crazy world we live in.  My crazy path through all kinds of work with amazingly creative people started with my first zine.  I wouldn't trade that for a Mercedes and a McMansion.  You never know where taking the time to publish a zine will lead you.  Enjoy the journey as much as you can.  

Zines, by their very nature, are collector's items.  Save them, cherish them, and don't wind up giving your own last copies away like I always manage to do.

The Richmond Zine Fest is starting right now, as I type this.  And all the links to make this post worth checking out are not linked yet.  So come back in a day or so and check it out again.

You can reach me by email at: stevenemig13@gmail.com .  Or you can friend me on Facebook, the only Steve Emig in Richmond, or steveemig43 on Instagram.  I don't have a working phone.  Gotta go, gotta get to the Zine Fest.

Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head.  Blues Brothers Wall, Huntington Beach, California, 1990.  She's a 4th grade teacher in Greensboro, North Carolina now.

I'm going to be sharing most of my old school BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...